In 2050, thanks to an advantageous deal he made with Warner Bros., Ryan Coogler will own the rights to “Sinners,” the Black Southern Gothic blockbuster he wrote and directed. The contract gave him final cut and a piece of the box office revenue right from the start, too. Owning his movie about Black ownership in the Jim Crow South was, Mr. Coogler has said, a nonnegotiable.
Since the film came out, these contract stipulations have been much discussed, even controversial. That has little to do with why “Sinners” is so enthralling to watch — after all it’s a genre-bending and -blending film, steeped in horror, blues and history, and even has vampires — but everything to do with the film’s central theme, and why it is so resonant: the art of the deal. Negotiation is a central thread in “Sinners,” a repeated motif about the power and consequence of deal-making in America. (This essay includes spoilers for “Sinners.”)
The protagonists of “Sinners” are identical twin brothers nicknamed Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, Mr. Coogler’s longtime collaborator. After serving in World War I and becoming involved with Chicago gangsters, the slick-talking duo return in 1932 to their Mississippi Delta hometown to set up a juke joint, enlisting their gifted cousin Sammie to play guitar. The town, Clarksdale, happens to also be the location of the crossroads where the legendary blues musician Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil for mastery over his guitar. With a satchel full of cash and a truck full of liquor, the twins come back to the South having realized that “Chicago is Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations.”
Their for-us-by-us plan was to generate wealth by owning and operating a blues-drenched sanctuary for Black joy, a private escape from the daily terror of racial oppression. Many of the clientele are Black sharecroppers who have been forced into exploitative contracts by white landowners, a point made evident in “Sinners” when a customer tries to use wooden coins to buy a drink. The fake money is good only at the plantation store.
Nobody Black had the leverage to negotiate a good deal in the Jim Crow South. Despite the vampires in the film, the real monsters are the ordinary-seeming men, like Hogwood, the covert Klansman from whom Smoke and Stack buy the mill they are going to turn into the juke joint, who smile as they take your money and shake your hand, and have no intention of honoring the terms.
During this time, legalistic disfranchisement was common for Black blues musicians, who were often unaware of how royalties worked, or were intentionally not told how they worked, or were just given a bottle of booze as payment. Bessie Smith thought she was signing a lucrative deal in 1923 with a white executive, Frank Buckley Walker, who oversaw “race records” for Columbia. Walker crossed out the royalty clause in her contract, and Smith was given a fixed fee of $200 per recording; she thought that was a good deal for a Black musician at the time, unaware that white country artists on Columbia often had royalty agreements, even though Smith was more successful than many. Smith received a little less than $30,000 for the 160 recordings she made for Columbia even though her estimated sales reached over six million records in the 1920s.
Smith died in 1937 in Clarksdale, from injuries sustained during a car crash on Highway 61, only a few miles from the mythical intersection where Johnson is said to have made his bargain with the devil. Johnson did not register any of his music and died penniless a year later, with no royalties for the 29 songs he recorded. However, his music keeps making money 87 years later for Columbia Records and other musicians covering his free, unprotected work, including Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and Bob Dylan.
All of which is the historical context for why Mr. Coogler’s successful negotiation matters to more than just him. And also, arguably, why it upset some people in the film industry.
On April 18, the day “Sinners” opened, Vulture published an article titled “Hollywood Execs Fear Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners’ Deal ‘Could End the Studio System.’” The reporter cited an unnamed studio executive calling the contract a “very dangerous” precedent. The most incendiary sentence, to me, was this: “The Coogler deal has come to be regarded as Hollywood’s latest (if not nearly greatest) extinction-level threat.”
When asked about the coverage on the “Democracy Now!” program, Mr. Coogler said, “I think a lot has been made of my deal in particular,” adding, “I’ve been in this industry long enough to know what kinds of deals are possible, and nothing in this deal is a new thing.” When the interviewer asked Mr. Coogler why he thought his agreement was drawing particular scrutiny, he laughed and responded, “I’d rather not say.”
And in fact his copyright arrangement is unusual, but not unprecedented. Quentin Tarantino secured a copyright-controlled deal for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” Similarly, in news media coverage at the time, nobody treated similar deals for Mel Gibson, Richard Linklater and Peter Jackson with such alarm, or even interest. Why is it somehow out of line for a bankable auteur like Mr. Coogler, who has a $2.5 billion track record with box office juggernauts like the “Black Panther” and “Creed” franchises?
Instead of viewing Mr. Coogler’s contract as a threat, why not criticize a movie industry that has exploited Black talent since it began? Again, I know the answer, which is why I do not see Mr. Coogler’s deal as a threat to what the Vulture article termed the “time-honored industry power balance.” The power was never in balance for Black people to begin with.
There is a goosebumps-inducing monologue early in “Sinners” by the old bluesman Delta Slim, riding in a car with Stack and Sammie as they pass a chain gang of Black prisoners. Delta Slim recalls his Black friend who tried to save money honestly and move away from Mississippi only to be castrated and lynched by the Ku Klux Klan for the audacity of wanting more for himself. Slim’s poetic speech of sorrow breaks into a dirge as his grief-drunk words dissipate into waves of uncontrollable moans, overtaken by a thunderhead of concentrated anguish as the groans morph into the bent, blue notes of the blues. Delta Slim slaps his thigh repeatedly like a bass drum — beat after beat after beat — an ancestral boom that resonates with the call-and-response reverberations in the leftover rhythms from the chain gang’s pounding hammers made into instruments to communicate to one another across the landscape of pain.
Having the power and privilege to make your own decisions is a central narrative struggle in “Sinners.” Throughout the film, characters are making and breaking deals, negotiating their needs and desires for money, sex, power, family, love, escape, music and freedom. In an early scene, Smoke asks a Black girl to watch his car and cargo for a small fee, and then teaches her how to negotiate: to never settle with the first offer, but to counteroffer, know her worth and ask for more.
In the coda of the film, we found out Sammie has lived a long life as a blues musician. (The older Sammie is played by the real-life blues legend Buddy Guy. The film was partly inspired by whiskey-sipping memories Mr. Coogler had of listening to old blues records and family stories about Mississippi with his uncle James, who loved Buddy Guy.) We found out that Smoke made a final deal with Stack (now a vampire) before he died to let Sammie live as a living testimony, an agreement made in thinking about what survives out of violence as a legacy to what came before, which is the main reason Mr. Coogler — who will be only 63 when the copyright of the film reverts back to him — fought for that copyright deal in the first place, for his children.
In an interview with Jelani Cobb for “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” Mr. Coogler talks about how hard Spike Lee had to work to get the funding he needed for his film “Malcolm X.”
“Hearing Spike talk about ‘Malcolm X’ and going door to door with Black celebrities to raise money for —— ” Here, Mr. Coogler cuts off his words as if to stop himself from breaking down, followed by a shaky sigh as his emotions overtake him as they do Delta Slim in his moving monologue.
Mr. Cobb then asks, “What does that mean to you to have to do that?” Mr. Coogler pauses as his voice trembled and trailed off. “I’m getting emotional because it’s hitting me now because I’m talking about the ease of which I can make a vampire movie this expensive.”
The ease that Mr. Coogler pinpoints here is why his deal for “Sinners” is so important and crucial to me as a Black writer navigating what’s possible. When I was negotiating my first book deal, I was given this piece of advice from one of my mentors: “They will make you feel like you have to be so grateful for everything that you’re not allowed to ask for anything. Ask anyway. Ask for what you need.”
Tiana Clark is a poet who teaches creative writing at Smith College and is the author of the collection “Scorched Earth.”
Source images by Warner Bros. Pictures and mikroman6/Getty Images.
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